In a recent piece for the Harvard Business Review, Pat Wadors, Senior Vice President of Global Talent Organization at LinkedIn, argues that storytelling is key to belonging at work. Learn more about the case she makes for belonging. We also include stories on the key to listening well, employee-led learning, a poet-turned CEO, hope and living wisely.
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Noted Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner died this year in June at 100 years of age, in the same year that the world commemorates the centennial of the publication of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education. These two great educational thinkers have provided bookends for the vast change – and disturbing lack of change – that marks a century of thought on how people learn and develop. In Bruner’s obituary in the New York Times, Howard Gardner said, “He was the most important contributor to educational thinking since John Dewey – and there is no one like him today.”
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Should companies help their employees learn? A recent article for the Harvard Business Review argues for lifelong learning in the workplace and offers three tips for cultivating it. We have this, as well as essays on meaningful work, book deserts, storytelling and literary quizzes in our most recent Weekend Reading.
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We are delighted to unveil our newest project: a short film introducing Books@Work in multiple voices, especially those of our partners and participants. This video captures the enthusiasm we see every day, helping us to share the Books@Work model, why our company partners choose to work with us and the experience of Books@Work from a participant’s perspective.
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In surveys and interviews—nearly 350 to date—our participants’ stories confirm our aspirations: Books@Work provides a safe space to reflect and share, creating the conditions for effective collaboration and more diverse and inclusive organizations and community.
Books@Work is growing—and learning, which is why I am pleased to announce the release of our 2015 Annual Report. In it, we celebrate our learnings and discoveries. During the time this report covers—January 1 to December 31, 2015—we served 586 participants in 40 programs in both company and community settings, partnering with 87 professors from 25 colleges in 8 states. Collectively, our participants read 101 books and many short stories.
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Though we often think about creativity as the production of an original work of art—a painting or a novel, perhaps—creativity is also the ability to synthesize and build on information. Creativity is innovation and problem solving; it’s seeing patterns and learning to explain them. When we say that something provokes creativity, we usually mean that it is in some way inspiring or that it encourages people to think outside of the box.
New research on creativity at work, however, indicates that creating the conditions for creativity might be less about inspiring an individual than it is about creating good teams and a space for respectful, common dialogue.
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When it comes to teaching, I confess that I’m a sucker for iconic texts: Shakespeare’s Othello, Mary Godwin Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Frankly, it bothers me that these authors’ fame derives from ubiquitous cultural allusions so divorced from their work. Boris Karloff immediately comes to mind when people hear the name Frankenstein. People blithely characterize someone as a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-type” without knowing the original story. And they refer to a talented person as a Shakespeare without having read enough of the Bard to know why he’s a genius. With the mission of connecting cultural allusions to their sources, I have introduced these texts to Books@Work readers, and several anecdotes will tell that tale of how well my approach has worked.
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Last week, we wrote about a recent Pew Internet study that confirmed the American hunger for continued learning opportunities: over the last 12 months, 74% of American adults report participation in some form of personal learning and 63% of employed adults report participation in some form of professional learning. Surprisingly, however, this learning is more likely than not to take place in a physical locale (a school, place or worship, library or a work-related venue) than on the Internet. Recent research on adult learning and development – as well as findings from our seminars – shed light on the complex reasons why adults prefer to learn socially.
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Books@Work helps your employees take a break from work—together.
Even as I write these words, having learned what I have from hundreds of participant interviews, I cringe a bit–worried that they will somehow be misunderstood. After all, do employers really want large groups of employees taking a break from work together? We have overwhelming support that Books@Work helps people connect with each other at a deeper level, to explore ideas they rarely get to share and to create a culture of respect, inclusion and openness to diverse perspectives. The benefit of these outcomes to the workplace is not hard to understand.
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